In the video, militants say "God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statutes worshiped instead of Allah in the past days" and "Whenever we seize a piece of land, we will remove signs of idolatry and spread monotheism."

The instincts of the initial European archeologists in the Middle East were to remove ancient artifacts to safe places in English or German museums for study and preservation. UNESCO pressure on European and American museums to repatriate such human treasures is insane. The history of iconoclasm in the Middle East is long and obvious to anyone who has seen the defaced frescoes and statues in ancient churches or greco-roman ruins in Turkey. The notion that these belong to the Arabic populations that currently live in these lands, to do with as they will, can only be seen as decadent self-loathing on the part of the West.

Idolators you say? Well I guess it takes one to know one - see Mecca. The Israelis should make a special effects video showing what's going to happen to Mecca if Israel gets nuked. No Masada, no Holocaust again without retribution.

I'm pretty sure Christianity could survive the loss of the Vatican (although it might unite us like crazy) but I wonder if Islam would survive the loss of Mecca and Medina.

Despite the global test ban treaty, I sometimes think it would be instructive to light one off somewhere for a demonstration. In these days of special effects, I'm afraid the old school newsreel footage is unconvincing. Better demonstration would be to start with the size bomb like Pakistan has, and Iran wants, and then light off a hydrogen bomb on top of it.

I see a lot of comments relating this to the whole pizza imbroglio in Indiana. They look apt.

ISIS destroys monuments to gods nobody has worshiped in thousands of years. Progressives try to destroy a pizza place because even though no customer has been turned away--it could happen--if a gay couple wanted pizza, from that place, on their special day.

Any threat, however slight, must be utterly stomped-out. At least the ISIS fanatics don't call their intolerance tolerance. They are brutal, but at least honest, in their own way.

No one has worshiped these idols for thousands of years, but still the perpetually offended are offended.

This is incorrect. It is not because these are idols (in many cases they are not) that Isis is destroying these works. It is because they depict or represent history — kafir (pre- or non- Islamic) history — that they must be destroyed.

As author V.S. Naipaul (who has made a considerable study of Islamists over the years) put it in this recent piece:

“[T]he particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror – such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) – interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.

“This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.

“It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.

“So an idea of history was born that was fundamentally different from the ideas of history that the rest of the world has evolved.

“In the centuries following, the world moved on. Ideas of civilisation, of other faiths, of art, of governance of law and of science and invention grew and flourished.

“This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.

“But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.”

I believe history ought to be preserved. But not all history. Some people take this to fanatical levels and you get no progress. I grew up on the west coast where there was always lots of building and expanding.

Then when I was older I went to the south and east coast and everything looked old and run down. Because they were preserving everything.

Actually, it was dug up just recently (last 200 years). And, no, while previous Muslim rulers didn't necessarily take action to destroy it, they didn't work to preserve it, either.

It was the British & French colonizers who dug up the antiquities, and set about to catalog & preserve them. The locals who jumped on the preservation bandwagon were often the local Westernizers or Christians or Jews or secularists. Post colonial regimes (Nasser in Egypt, the Ba'athists in Iraq) would sometimes tie into the pre-Muslim histories of their countries in order to try & build a "national" identity separate from the religious identities (i.e. the milet system) that traditional Muslim culture had bequeathed to them. But, other than that, Islamic society didn't have a lot of use for "antiquity" in the same way that Christian culture did.

As mentioned above, the Saudi regime certainly has done a lot to erase archeological sites across their realm. This is not just in relation to things that could be linked to Judaism, but also to any pre-Muslim sites or artifacts (save the Kaaba). This has been mentioned in various sources since the 1960s, if I recall correctly. There are some early Muslim sites destroyed as well, IIRC. As for Naipaul, much of his two Muslim books expand on the matter of Muslim regimes deliberate erasure of predecessor civilizations, including much Taliban and ISIS style vandalism. In the Muslim controlled parts of the subcontinent this has apparently been very thorough.

Michael McNeil quoting Naipaul: “This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.

“But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.”

Coupe: North Americans did the same thing with ancient Indian graves. It's all progress.

Coupe, you really need to work harder on this "analogy" thing you're trying out here. I see you've managed Step 1, asking yourself "how is Thing A like this Thing B I want to compare it to?"

But that's just the first step. Now, you can find incidents in New World history that really are analogous to this ISIS behavior - e.g, the deliberate destruction of Mayan codices. But the examples you give are not. Unless the Old World conquerors and their descendants were and are just really, really incompetent in carrying out this deliberate "wipe 'em from history" campaign against the conquered that you're imputing, and ISIS has future plans for a "Museum of the Kingdom of Nimrud" in the Caliphate's capital should their dreams of power be fulfilled.

ISIS is doing it now, getting the reptile lizard aliens mad at them... destroying Babylon, Nimrud... how long before the Illuminati reptoids swarm out from their underground bases and abduct ISIS for genetic experimentation? David Icke told me all about it...

dbp said...At least the ISIS fanatics don't call their intolerance tolerance. They are brutal, but at least honest, in their own way.

Saying they're less dishonest than socialist activists is "damning with faint praise".

Blogger Rusty said...IslamThe religion of ignorance.

God told 'em to do it, like this:

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;"

They're probably just protecting people - and the people's children unto the third and fourth generation - who might stumble upon the relics and, out of an arrogant ignorance, think they're cool.

This is incorrect. It is not because these are idols (in many cases they are not) that Isis is destroying these works. It is because they depict or represent history — kafir (pre- or non- Islamic) history — that they must be destroyed.

Ancient Assyrian city.

Assyrians have been Christians for Millennia.

No idolatry going on.

I am first generation Assyrian.

The situation is beyond pathetic. It is evidence of diseased minds at work.

Yeah, I guess that's why Bonaparte made sure that all the historians, archeologists, linguists, artists, and scientists stayed back in France when he was swanking around Egypt trying to obliterate the past, eh? "Soldats, songez que du haut de ces monuments, quarante siècles vous contemplent"! Obviously a man with no sense of history, appealing to like-minded men.

Yeah, I guess that's why Bonaparte made sure that all the historians, archeologists, linguists, artists, and scientists stayed back in France when he was swanking around Egypt trying to obliterate the past, eh

Bonaparte wasn't French, he was Corsican, which means he was more Italian than French.

Man started out worshiping the food source. It took Greeks to create a really fun set of personality gods. That only made the Hebrews mad, and so One creator was postulated that spoke among his selves became the Hebrews God and set up the People using the most powerful single man to ever live on the earth, named Moses.

Than a rural Hebrew carpenter's assistant named Jesus hijacked it all since His Father happened to be God and He gave it all to Him after He died and rose from the dead. He rules everybody now. And you have no idea how mad that has made the Arab caravan raiders descendants.

Really? I'm not a high-energy physicist, but I didn't think the techniques used for variable yield affected the amount of neutrons emitted other than as a side-effect (as opposed to minimizing the containing case as much as possible, so that as many neutrons as possible escape the device, which I thought was the point of Cohen's original design.)

"Not long afterward I went out on another patrol to a little Serb village a few kilometers outside Sarajevo. At one point as we were walking along, we stopped at a cemetery. The patrol leader shouted a few directions to his troops and they started digging up a grave. At first I thought they must be looking for weapons. It is an old trick to cache weapons in a grave. It looks like you are going to dig up Omar but what you are really after is a case of AK-47s. While they were digging, I wandered around the graveyard. Checking the marker they had thrown aside, I saw the guy had a Muslim name and had died in 1944. This puzzled me.

Finally, the shovels hit a coffin. The soldiers scraped away the dirt and climbed out. Then they all lined up around the hold and pulled out their ****s and pissed on the coffin. Atfter that, the patrol leader snapped an order. This time the troops slammed rounds into their chambers and emptied their magazines into the disintegrating casket.

"What goes on here?" I said to the patrol leader.

"That man was very, very bad man," he said. "He killed many Serbs during World War Two. He is being punished."

If you go to that kind of trouble to punish the dead, I thought, what are you going to do to the living?"

"What are you going to do to the living?"... What indeed? I guess we can start looking at the Yazidi as an example and go from there.

It seems more typical of Islam to over-top existing monuments, or to re-purpose them. For example: the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, or the re-purposing of the Hagia Sophia after the conquest of Constantinople.

This simple destruction is video heater, intended not only to enrage but to make clear that ISIS represents a return to the 7th Century, to the give-no-quarter, never compromise, keep the truce only until it's in your interest to break it attitude that is characteristic of Islam's bloody origins.

As such it is perhaps more of a challenge to non-Islamic Islam than to non-Muslims?